2
I slip past the boys to Adam. “Are you okay?” I ask, tugging back his sweatshirt hood to examine his head.
Now that he no longer has to keep his blond hair short for football, it’s grown out.
I push it aside to find two large welts forming on his forehead.
They’re just above the thin and puckered flesh where his right eyebrow used to be, above the impaired eye and the scars running like tracks across the right side of his face.
Hiding behind the hood and the hair, he’s far from the clean-cut all-American boy and confident future prom king of last year.
Two bumps on Adam’s head means we missed the first shot those jerks took at him. “Let me take you to the nurse for some ice.” I attempt to pull him up by the hand, but he shrinks away, tugging his hood back up.
“I don’t need the nurse.”
“You could have a concussion,” I protest as the bell rings, ending lunch.
“Who cares?” he says, standing. He pushes right between his brothers, soon lost in the crowd headed for the door.
“Why don’t you stop him?” I ask Henry and Bram. “He could be—”
“Just, let him go, Hayden.” Lightly, Henry touches my shoulder. “The last thing he wants is to be babied.”
Unsatisfied, I glance at Bram, who looks like he wishes he’d kept twisting Neil’s arm. I imagine the sound of the bone snapping and wince.
Before I can ask him to drag Adam into the nurse’s office, Henry moves closer to his brother to mutter, “Can we have a word, please?”
“You can say whatever you want in front of her.” Bram’s gray-blue eyes meet mine, and my pulse accelerates. With his messy black hair, pale skin, and chiseled jaw, Bram’s looks are nothing like the easy, disarming ones of his brother Henry.
Bram’s dark beauty is something else. Something that causes my heart to seize in my chest for a moment whenever I see him.
His charm and enigmatic allure have always had something of a choke hold on me.
I used to think of him as nearly as close a friend as Henry, but now it’s like I’m afraid to be alone with him.
I see him, and feelings of attraction and guilt swarm in my stomach.
I can’t help but remember what happened the summer before last when we were alone together.
Something I’ve never told Henry about, for fear of hurting him and ruining our friendship.
Henry casts a nervous look at me before nodding at Bram. “Fine then. What the hell was that? We don’t exactly need proof that the whole town was right about some violent streak. Half the cafeteria was filming that whole show.”
Bram shrugs. “Where were their cameras when Ellison and his crew were making a football target out of Adam’s head?”
“You know that isn’t the point. You’d already stopped it. You didn’t need to—”
“He doesn’t stand up for himself,” Bram says, the words so pained they stab at my chest. “Adam, he just…sits there and takes it. But I couldn’t.”
Henry inhales slowly, and I’m torn between attempting to comfort him and heading out the door. For a moment, I wish I were anywhere but here. Though Bram insisted on making me a part of it, this space between the brothers is too taut with emotion. Too sacred. I’ve never felt more like an outsider.
“I know,” Henry finally says. “If I’d gotten there first, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
I try to picture it, Henry grabbing Neil by the arm.
By the neck even. On the football field, Henry was always running.
He was quick, so the coach put him at running back.
I saw him knocked to the ground plenty, but I never saw him put a hand on another player.
In fact, I’ve only seen him get physically violent once.
The tardy bell rings, and I start toward the door. I expect the boys to follow, only they don’t. “Coming?” I ask.
“You go on ahead,” Henry says. “We’ll be along in a sec.”
I force a smile and head out to my locker, somewhat relieved to be excused from their conversation.
In sixth period, my art elective, part of me is waiting to get called into the principal’s office about the incident during lunch.
Adam is supposed to be in this class, but he isn’t here now.
Which means he either got called to the office, or he actually listened to me and went to the school nurse.
It has to be the former. First of all, Adam is a bit of a hothead who’s never really listened to anyone.
After his accident, he became even worse.
He sank into himself and closed himself off to seemingly everyone, including his brothers.
Second of all, I know my schoolmates are trying to skew the facts. They want the Abbott brothers back in their mansion, isolated inside those walls the way they were last year. They probably went straight to Mr. Ortega’s office with their videos.
Though it is odd that I didn’t hear the principal’s voice on the intercom. Maybe Adam decided to take the rest of the day off. I wouldn’t blame him.
The idea eases my concerns. I let my guard down, let my mind fade into the world of the painting in front of me, when a harsh buzz sounds. Over and over. The fire alarm.
We look to the art teacher, Ms. Barrett, who apologizes for not having checked her bulletin that day. “It’s probably a drill. Leave your things, and we’ll head out the door and down the hall, single file.”
Normally, we wouldn’t complain about getting out of class.
Except this is art, our easiest period of the day and the one in which half the class was napping.
There’s grumbling as everyone stuffs their phones in their pockets.
I glance around for someone to walk with, remembering with a sinking feeling that, apart from Adam, I don’t really have any friends in this class.
But before I reach the door, Penelope Kaur, the best artist in the class, says midyawn, “I was just about to go into REM.”
Sure, Penelope. She glances back at the precious painting she just slaved over, like she’s about to abandon it to the flames.
The loud buzz continues as we march down the hall and exit through the back doors to the fields.
The chatter is loud and easy, muffling Ms. Barrett’s instructions.
“Stay with your class! No wandering!” She starts counting us off, and as other classes swarm around us, the rest of the teachers do the same.
The alarm continues, and at my side, Penelope starts to moan and bob her head in time with the buzz. “Shouldn’t they have turned that thing off by now?”
“Maybe it’s a real fire,” I say, new worries spiking about Adam, who could be in there somewhere, trapped.
But there’s still no smoke to be seen, no flames. No smell, for that matter. Usually when there’s a drill, Mr. Ortega will walk from class to class, taking down attendance numbers. Only I haven’t seen him yet.
Penelope takes out her phone. “Whatever’s going on, at least school is almost over. I just hope they let us back inside to get our stuff.”
“They will,” I assure her, knowing her thoughts are on that painting.
After another ten minutes, some of our classmates flop down into the grass, and Penelope and I follow suit. Two guys near us start making a TikTok about our plight, and I consider texting Adam, just to check on him.
When Penelope taps my arm, I look up to see Mr. Ortega striding through the back doors to speak with the teacher from the next class. He quickly makes his way to Ms. Barrett, but between the constant buzzing and the chatter, I can’t make out a word.
The next class over starts to wander in herd formation back toward the building, and finally, Ms. Barrett nods and turns to us. “We have the all clear!” she shouts over the alarm.
“Great,” I say, grabbing my ears as we near the doors. “It sounds like everything is totally resolved.”
Behind me, some of the baseball players joke about taking their bats to the alarm. But before we reach the building, the buzzing stops.
“Oh, thank God,” Penelope says. “My head was about to explode.” We barely cross the classroom’s threshold when another buzz sounds.
My body tenses, but it’s only the final school bell, releasing us for the day.
I grab my things and head out the door to my locker, scanning the hall for Henry. Even though I have my license, the moment the boys turned sixteen, sophomore year, they started driving me to school and even home on days we didn’t have extracurriculars.
They’re probably waiting for me in the parking lot. I heft my backpack and head through the front doors. When I make it down the steps, spotting Henry and Adam talking beside the boys’ shared black Mustang, a distant shriek tears through the air.
I continue toward the car, a joke on my tongue about the dramatics of the crows in Silver Creek, when I hear it again. Louder this time, the sound sends a chill down my spine.
Henry’s wide eyes meet mine, and I know.
That wasn’t a bird’s call. That sound was a human scream.